10 ms·

Yes, Facebook's current network is fairly strong, but you shouldn't look to where the masses currently are, you should look to where the trendsetters, the young

Yes, Facebook's current network is fairly strong, but you shouldn't look to where the masses currently are, you should look to where the trendsetters, the young, and the people in the know—where they are. These people are ahead of the curve, and the signs they are emitting is that Facebook is not serving their interests and needs. Young people don't want to use facebook because it forces you to interact with everyone, including parents and people out of your circle. Privacy conscious people and many at the forefront of technology all either personally avoid and limit facebook usage or keep their children away from it (if they aren't already disinterested in the first place). Yes Facebook allows you to "fix" these issues with enough configurations, but then why would a new user go through the hassle of all that when they could just install snapchat or instagram (yes I know facebook owns this, but it's not facebook). So unless there's a fundamental shift in its business model and allure, its trajectory will be doomed. It doesn't mean Facebook the company will fail, but it does mean that the Facebook product—what it is in its current form—has a finite shelf life.

bad_good_guy 9y ago
Those people are on Instagram and WhatsApp...
- chrischen 9y ago
  > "(yes I know facebook owns this, but it's not facebook)"
734786710934 9y ago
Facebook has no serious competition at the moment other than Snapchat. Young people are still using Instagram and Messenger. Ironically, the calls for regulation might actually end up helping Facebook in the end as they will make the barriers to entry higher.
- chrischen 9y ago
  Instagram is a completely different app, usage, and completely different UI/UX from Facebook. Facebook's problems are caused by Facebook (website)'s design, trajectory, and business model. It doesn't have anything to do with inherent evilness in the company itself.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - hsljekskfh 9y ago
    i'm personally interested to hear why you think it's so different. i don't use fb or ig and don't understand how they're different, from my understanding they both seem to be feeds of photos and memes from your friends (minus the new stories feature)
  - socialist_coder 9y ago
    I'm replying to the dead comment. The Facebook site is evil and should be destroyed because of 2 reasons, in my opinion. Firstly, the news feed is solely designed to get you to stay on the site for longer. And what that means is you get an echo chamber. So, idiot people get idiot posts that agree with them. It's not just a problem on one side of the political spectrum, it's a problem for any extreme view. Anti-vaxxers, left wing communists, and right wing fascists all get into their echo chamber and never get out. Secondly, the advertising platform that Facebook has created is too powerful. It lets you micro-target people in a way that is absolutely perfect for political ads. You find people vulnerable to an emotional message and bombard them with your emotionally responsive ads. Facebook ads are good for non-political things as well, but in this case, we'll have to throw the baby out with the bathwater I think.
    - MarkMc 9y ago
      Do we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater? We can have regulation that bans the use personal information for political ads but allows it for toothpaste ads
      - 9y ago
- JDWolf 9y ago
  MS LinkedIn seems like a pretty strong competitor to me. Seems like their logo/like buttons/messaging/user experience is converging that direction. Perhaps they will offer Office-Ville or Kanban-Crush-Saga.
  - Roybot 9y ago
    When social media platforms are optimizing for user engagement, it's not surprising that you're seeing the same features. With enough A/B testing they all discover the same thing and end up on the same path. The FB feed has become a bunch of memes/videos, increasing engagement. It won't be surprising once the LinkedIn feed becomes saturated with videos as well. I don't see LinkedIn as a strict competitor to FB. They're both social platforms but different.
  - mygo 9y ago
    LinkedIn is not a competitor to Facebook. Why? Context. When you go on facebook you’re in a social state of mind. When you go on LinkedIn you’re in a formal / business state of mind. It’s a glorified resume and socially conservative af. That fact alone means that, even if LinkedIn has the same exact user base as facebook, we are not going to use LinkedIn like we do facebook. Facebook profits off of our attention and engagement. Facebook’s real competition is who or whatever holds our attention. Whoever manages to make us give facebook less of our time. LinkedIn does not really have our attention like facebook does. We set up a profile and leave and maybe get on it when job hunting or when someone writes us a recommendation. There is no “LinkedIn addiction.” But you wanna know what website has been getting even more and more of our attention? Netflix lol. Netflix can take hours out of our day and during those hours we may be so absorbed in the show that we’re not really engaging with facebook. So yeah, Netflix is a bigger competitor to facebook than LinkedIn.
    - FullyFunctional 9y ago
      So, HN then? (I'm only half-kidding. I have an unhealthy addiction to HN)
      - 9y ago
- tilertex 9y ago
  There's a reason Mark Zuckerberg himself came out and said he's "actually not sure we shouldn't be regulated" and it's not because he has genuine concerns about his users privacy. It's because regulation increases the barrier to entry. It means less chance of some college students starting an app that can dethrone Facebook.
  - cies 9y ago
    > and it's not because he has genuine concerns about his users privacy. yups. FB users are to FB, what cows are to milk farms. main difference is that FB users are free to go, and cows are in some sort of bonded labour/slavery construction, although it is not commonly called that way.
- gaius 9y ago
  Facebook has no serious competition at the moment The competition is “socialising the pre-Facebook way”
  - billysielu 9y ago
    Not socializing so much is also valid.
  - someoneelse987 9y ago
    To me what changed with Facebook was that the local address book that I had on my phone became a tree in a central graph owned by a company and I was fine giving out that information. Today who could muster up the trust needed for me to let them know about everyone I know? I think no such company exists or ever will. I have no social internet accounts left except for this one. I even recently deleted my Linkedin account even though that is bad for my career (?). I just don't want to feel raped all the time. I keep getting Linkedin-ish head-hunting emails though but I'm sure that'll clear up in a year or so. If I'm ever socializing again on the internet, give me something that doesn't rape me in the *. Otherwise I'm fine just socializing IRL. I hope we are a void and that something new is about to happen.
    - robin_reala 9y ago
      I’ve never had a LinkedIn account (and have got myself into some sort of internal blacklist) and I’ve never felt disadvantaged career-wise or even been asked if I have an account.
  - therein 9y ago
    Let me download MSN Messenger. I remember there was a J2ME client for my Nokia 3650.
    - znpy 9y ago
      I honestly miss MSN Messenger. Fond memories.
- MarkMc 9y ago
  If people were to switch from using Facebook to Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp it would be hugely destructive to Facebook's market cap.
- narrator 9y ago
  When resentment builds against an entrenched company, and a good alternative comes along, the shift can be pretty rapid. The Quark-X-press to Adobe InDesign exodus was particularly fast.
- pnutjam 9y ago
  Check out mewe.com
- oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
  > Ironically, the calls for regulation might actually end up helping Facebook in the end as they will make the barriers to entry higher. The barrier will only be higher for potential services that want to avoid those regulations. If the market moves in a 'wants more privacy' direction, barrier to entry shouldn't be a problem.
- gldalmaso 9y ago
  At least in Brazil I think there is serious competition in the form of WhatsApp. It allows plenty of the things that FB initially brought to the table in the form of family, friend and work groups where people actually share their personal stuff now, while in FB people just mostly show off some generic things and share news articles in their bubble. I would say WhatsApp right now is a lot more social than FB is. When you meet someone new you ask them for their WhatsApp number, not to add them to FB. Sure FB owns WhatsApp but I don't think they can leverage it financially nearly as much. If ads start to pop up on WhatsApp people will simply flock to different messengers with similar functionality.
  - ascorbic 9y ago
    Whether or not a WhatsApp user is more valuable to them than a FB one, there's no way you can call it serious competition if they own it.
fossuser 9y ago
All young people are on FB, they may additionally be on something else (probably Instagram which is also FB and starving out Snap) - the default remains Facebook. I'd bet against you. The trajectory is fine and Zuckerberg is a good CEO. They have nearly a third of the earth as users and a ridiculously high percentage of internet users. Given a long enough time horizon any company is vulnerable, but FB is here to stay for a long while.
- varrock 9y ago
  I've always attributed Facebook's success with older generations to the feeling you get when somebody you're talking to brings up a name you hadn't heard in numerous years, and here's why. Let's first think about the demographic that has kept Facebook afloat; Baby Boomers and Generation X. When you think about most of these individuals, they graduated high school and college without much there to remind them of individuals they were acquainted with, minus maybe their yearbooks from high school. Sure, most probably wrote or emailed their close friends, but we're talking about those afterthought individuals that they came into contact with under specific circumstances that generated that "acquaintance" classification. Then, all of a sudden, appears Facebook, a platform that allows these individuals to link their name with their school. It's a database at their fingertips with all of their classmates with up-to-date pictures, life stories, and mutual friends to explore. Facebook is that one "person" I referenced earlier; the person that brings up that name you hadn't thought about for years, except now you can actually explore what they are up to, and Facebook continuously reminds people of those afterthought names. The question is, how long is this effect going to sustain Facebook's competitive advantage? Like people have mentioned, there was Whitepages, now there is Facebook, but what's next?
- Retric 9y ago
  Logging in once a year is meaningless from a network effect standpoint. They might have an account and even use it to talk with grandparents, but without daily use FB has little pull.
  - fossuser 9y ago
    They have over two billion monthly active users - not sure the DAU stat, but hundreds of millions would not surprise me.
wizardforhire 9y ago
I've been putting off posting this for months because when I write it, it seems grandiose but it's been my life and it's too ridiculous not to share. I was born in 80 so that dates me. I've worked in music for the last 20 years and I've worked with over 60 bands most of whom are very successful now. However that number is misleading because I've toured with hundreds of bands if you count the openers and headliners over the years. It's stupid really when I look back on it. Once when I was 25 I used my network to start a music festival with no money that's been going on for the last 10 years and has never had less than 50k people attend. Anyways long story short most people don't understand marketing. But when you're touring you're living it. I remember when the words taste maker started getting thrown around. I remember when gorilla marketing became a thing... Because the marketing people would all be coming to our shows and our parties and sponsoring us. All of this to say that We were early adopters of Friendster, when they killed the bulletin board my friends and I moved to MySpace, when MySpace got over crowded we moved to Facebook, when our families friends got on Facebook we left for Twitter and reddit, the less public of us left Twitter almost immediately but our pr teams stayed, when Obama won in 08 we left reddit. Many of us went to snapchat and we all use Instagram even though we hate it. There was a minor period when we thought google + was going to serve us but that lasted exactly one day. What we desperately want is a decentralized encrypted locally hosted application that has exactly one killer simple feature. A bulletin board to post events. That's it. A simple way to keep in touch with each other and local ownership of our photos and videos. Sure to reduce bandwidth we'd be fine with our friends or fans hosting encrypted files on their devices but that's as far as they go. Do that, slap an easy to use interface on it, don't have advertising call it something literal like friends torrent or something and we'll never have another Facebook. If you want to monotize it... Give it a market place. But if you take anything from this rant it should be this, your tastemakers aren't faceless nameless statistics they're real people and they're friends with each other. We know who we are and we are and have been paying attention. Also fuck Facebook freedom isn't free
- firmgently 9y ago
  Facebook's popularity is driven by that tic of just wanting to have a quick look to see what friends/family are up to, then getting stuck there because of addiction/manipulative techniques. I can't see people feeling the same way about a site which is only about events, it's a different impulse... almost like tuning in to an adverts-only station. Nobody is on FB because of bands - although they're happy to find out what bands are up to when they happen to already be on the site (not knocking bands as a thing - the same applies to eg. my art page). Some might say "it doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be as popular as FB" but at that point then why not just have a website?
rurban 9y ago
Teenagers already abandoned Facebook long time ago and switched over to Instagram. Same company, but less privacy problems for them.
DonaldFoss 9y ago
Don't discount Warren Buffet's mantra. When people are scared, he buys. When stockholders feel great, he sells. So fear=buy if fundamentals are good, exhuburence = sell and make profit. --Donald

bad_good_guy 9y ago

Those people are on Instagram and WhatsApp...

chrischen 9y ago
> "(yes I know facebook owns this, but it's not facebook)"

734786710934 9y ago

Facebook has no serious competition at the moment other than Snapchat. Young people are still using Instagram and Messenger. Ironically, the calls for regulation might actually end up helping Facebook in the end as they will make the barriers to entry higher.

chrischen 9y ago
Instagram is a completely different app, usage, and completely different UI/UX from Facebook. Facebook's problems are caused by Facebook (website)'s design, trajectory, and business model. It doesn't have anything to do with inherent evilness in the company itself.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- hsljekskfh 9y ago
  i'm personally interested to hear why you think it's so different. i don't use fb or ig and don't understand how they're different, from my understanding they both seem to be feeds of photos and memes from your friends (minus the new stories feature)
- socialist_coder 9y ago
  I'm replying to the dead comment. The Facebook site is evil and should be destroyed because of 2 reasons, in my opinion. Firstly, the news feed is solely designed to get you to stay on the site for longer. And what that means is you get an echo chamber. So, idiot people get idiot posts that agree with them. It's not just a problem on one side of the political spectrum, it's a problem for any extreme view. Anti-vaxxers, left wing communists, and right wing fascists all get into their echo chamber and never get out. Secondly, the advertising platform that Facebook has created is too powerful. It lets you micro-target people in a way that is absolutely perfect for political ads. You find people vulnerable to an emotional message and bombard them with your emotionally responsive ads. Facebook ads are good for non-political things as well, but in this case, we'll have to throw the baby out with the bathwater I think.
  - MarkMc 9y ago
    Do we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater? We can have regulation that bans the use personal information for political ads but allows it for toothpaste ads
    - 9y ago
JDWolf 9y ago
MS LinkedIn seems like a pretty strong competitor to me. Seems like their logo/like buttons/messaging/user experience is converging that direction. Perhaps they will offer Office-Ville or Kanban-Crush-Saga.
- Roybot 9y ago
  When social media platforms are optimizing for user engagement, it's not surprising that you're seeing the same features. With enough A/B testing they all discover the same thing and end up on the same path. The FB feed has become a bunch of memes/videos, increasing engagement. It won't be surprising once the LinkedIn feed becomes saturated with videos as well. I don't see LinkedIn as a strict competitor to FB. They're both social platforms but different.
- mygo 9y ago
  LinkedIn is not a competitor to Facebook. Why? Context. When you go on facebook you’re in a social state of mind. When you go on LinkedIn you’re in a formal / business state of mind. It’s a glorified resume and socially conservative af. That fact alone means that, even if LinkedIn has the same exact user base as facebook, we are not going to use LinkedIn like we do facebook. Facebook profits off of our attention and engagement. Facebook’s real competition is who or whatever holds our attention. Whoever manages to make us give facebook less of our time. LinkedIn does not really have our attention like facebook does. We set up a profile and leave and maybe get on it when job hunting or when someone writes us a recommendation. There is no “LinkedIn addiction.” But you wanna know what website has been getting even more and more of our attention? Netflix lol. Netflix can take hours out of our day and during those hours we may be so absorbed in the show that we’re not really engaging with facebook. So yeah, Netflix is a bigger competitor to facebook than LinkedIn.
  - FullyFunctional 9y ago
    So, HN then? (I'm only half-kidding. I have an unhealthy addiction to HN)
    - 9y ago
tilertex 9y ago
There's a reason Mark Zuckerberg himself came out and said he's "actually not sure we shouldn't be regulated" and it's not because he has genuine concerns about his users privacy. It's because regulation increases the barrier to entry. It means less chance of some college students starting an app that can dethrone Facebook.
- cies 9y ago
  > and it's not because he has genuine concerns about his users privacy. yups. FB users are to FB, what cows are to milk farms. main difference is that FB users are free to go, and cows are in some sort of bonded labour/slavery construction, although it is not commonly called that way.
gaius 9y ago
Facebook has no serious competition at the moment The competition is “socialising the pre-Facebook way”
- billysielu 9y ago
  Not socializing so much is also valid.
- someoneelse987 9y ago
  To me what changed with Facebook was that the local address book that I had on my phone became a tree in a central graph owned by a company and I was fine giving out that information. Today who could muster up the trust needed for me to let them know about everyone I know? I think no such company exists or ever will. I have no social internet accounts left except for this one. I even recently deleted my Linkedin account even though that is bad for my career (?). I just don't want to feel raped all the time. I keep getting Linkedin-ish head-hunting emails though but I'm sure that'll clear up in a year or so. If I'm ever socializing again on the internet, give me something that doesn't rape me in the *. Otherwise I'm fine just socializing IRL. I hope we are a void and that something new is about to happen.
  - robin_reala 9y ago
    I’ve never had a LinkedIn account (and have got myself into some sort of internal blacklist) and I’ve never felt disadvantaged career-wise or even been asked if I have an account.
- therein 9y ago
  Let me download MSN Messenger. I remember there was a J2ME client for my Nokia 3650.
  - znpy 9y ago
    I honestly miss MSN Messenger. Fond memories.
MarkMc 9y ago
If people were to switch from using Facebook to Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp it would be hugely destructive to Facebook's market cap.
narrator 9y ago
When resentment builds against an entrenched company, and a good alternative comes along, the shift can be pretty rapid. The Quark-X-press to Adobe InDesign exodus was particularly fast.
pnutjam 9y ago
Check out mewe.com
oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
> Ironically, the calls for regulation might actually end up helping Facebook in the end as they will make the barriers to entry higher. The barrier will only be higher for potential services that want to avoid those regulations. If the market moves in a 'wants more privacy' direction, barrier to entry shouldn't be a problem.
gldalmaso 9y ago
At least in Brazil I think there is serious competition in the form of WhatsApp. It allows plenty of the things that FB initially brought to the table in the form of family, friend and work groups where people actually share their personal stuff now, while in FB people just mostly show off some generic things and share news articles in their bubble. I would say WhatsApp right now is a lot more social than FB is. When you meet someone new you ask them for their WhatsApp number, not to add them to FB. Sure FB owns WhatsApp but I don't think they can leverage it financially nearly as much. If ads start to pop up on WhatsApp people will simply flock to different messengers with similar functionality.
- ascorbic 9y ago
  Whether or not a WhatsApp user is more valuable to them than a FB one, there's no way you can call it serious competition if they own it.

fossuser 9y ago

All young people are on FB, they may additionally be on something else (probably Instagram which is also FB and starving out Snap) - the default remains Facebook. I'd bet against you. The trajectory is fine and Zuckerberg is a good CEO. They have nearly a third of the earth as users and a ridiculously high percentage of internet users. Given a long enough time horizon any company is vulnerable, but FB is here to stay for a long while.

varrock 9y ago
I've always attributed Facebook's success with older generations to the feeling you get when somebody you're talking to brings up a name you hadn't heard in numerous years, and here's why. Let's first think about the demographic that has kept Facebook afloat; Baby Boomers and Generation X. When you think about most of these individuals, they graduated high school and college without much there to remind them of individuals they were acquainted with, minus maybe their yearbooks from high school. Sure, most probably wrote or emailed their close friends, but we're talking about those afterthought individuals that they came into contact with under specific circumstances that generated that "acquaintance" classification. Then, all of a sudden, appears Facebook, a platform that allows these individuals to link their name with their school. It's a database at their fingertips with all of their classmates with up-to-date pictures, life stories, and mutual friends to explore. Facebook is that one "person" I referenced earlier; the person that brings up that name you hadn't thought about for years, except now you can actually explore what they are up to, and Facebook continuously reminds people of those afterthought names. The question is, how long is this effect going to sustain Facebook's competitive advantage? Like people have mentioned, there was Whitepages, now there is Facebook, but what's next?
Retric 9y ago
Logging in once a year is meaningless from a network effect standpoint. They might have an account and even use it to talk with grandparents, but without daily use FB has little pull.
- fossuser 9y ago
  They have over two billion monthly active users - not sure the DAU stat, but hundreds of millions would not surprise me.

wizardforhire 9y ago

I've been putting off posting this for months because when I write it, it seems grandiose but it's been my life and it's too ridiculous not to share. I was born in 80 so that dates me. I've worked in music for the last 20 years and I've worked with over 60 bands most of whom are very successful now. However that number is misleading because I've toured with hundreds of bands if you count the openers and headliners over the years. It's stupid really when I look back on it. Once when I was 25 I used my network to start a music festival with no money that's been going on for the last 10 years and has never had less than 50k people attend. Anyways long story short most people don't understand marketing. But when you're touring you're living it. I remember when the words taste maker started getting thrown around. I remember when gorilla marketing became a thing... Because the marketing people would all be coming to our shows and our parties and sponsoring us. All of this to say that We were early adopters of Friendster, when they killed the bulletin board my friends and I moved to MySpace, when MySpace got over crowded we moved to Facebook, when our families friends got on Facebook we left for Twitter and reddit, the less public of us left Twitter almost immediately but our pr teams stayed, when Obama won in 08 we left reddit. Many of us went to snapchat and we all use Instagram even though we hate it. There was a minor period when we thought google + was going to serve us but that lasted exactly one day. What we desperately want is a decentralized encrypted locally hosted application that has exactly one killer simple feature. A bulletin board to post events. That's it. A simple way to keep in touch with each other and local ownership of our photos and videos. Sure to reduce bandwidth we'd be fine with our friends or fans hosting encrypted files on their devices but that's as far as they go. Do that, slap an easy to use interface on it, don't have advertising call it something literal like friends torrent or something and we'll never have another Facebook. If you want to monotize it... Give it a market place. But if you take anything from this rant it should be this, your tastemakers aren't faceless nameless statistics they're real people and they're friends with each other. We know who we are and we are and have been paying attention. Also fuck Facebook freedom isn't free

firmgently 9y ago
Facebook's popularity is driven by that tic of just wanting to have a quick look to see what friends/family are up to, then getting stuck there because of addiction/manipulative techniques. I can't see people feeling the same way about a site which is only about events, it's a different impulse... almost like tuning in to an adverts-only station. Nobody is on FB because of bands - although they're happy to find out what bands are up to when they happen to already be on the site (not knocking bands as a thing - the same applies to eg. my art page). Some might say "it doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be as popular as FB" but at that point then why not just have a website?

rurban 9y ago

Teenagers already abandoned Facebook long time ago and switched over to Instagram. Same company, but less privacy problems for them.

DonaldFoss 9y ago

Don't discount Warren Buffet's mantra. When people are scared, he buys. When stockholders feel great, he sells. So fear=buy if fundamentals are good, exhuburence = sell and make profit. --Donald